Game changing ways to leverage your CRM data on Facebook and Instagram

by Alex Russell

Today’s consumer is more connected than ever before. The advances in mobile technology have empowered customers to shop in a huge variety of ways, and on the journey to purchase they engage with countless different touch points. One of the biggest trends of 2016 is ‘omni-channel shopping’ and marketers are being challenged with accurately tracking this customer habit.

For a marketer, the information contained in their CRM is more important than ever, and is an absolute goldmine if leveraged to it’s full potential on social. We know that today’s customer, more than likely, uses either Facebook or Instagram, or both, so leveraging your CRM data to find that customer in a social environment gives you an incredible opportunity to continue the marketing story at scale. As Facebook Inc. now boasts 1.71 billion users connected globally (which is an increase of 220 million active monthly users in the last year) extending your consolidated 1st and 3rd party data to these channels shouldn’t be a ‘nice to have’ strategy, it should be a ‘must have’ strategy.

You could argue that selling to existing customers is much easier than looking for and acquiring new ones, so make sure you are using Custom Audiences to reinforce existing customer connections. This is the first step to linking CRM and social activity. As a business with a CRM, you will naturally have lists of people who are part of your audience segments (for example, current customers/users, past purchasers, high value customers, loyalty programme members etc.) using Custom Audiences you can match to their social profile and engage with them across Facebook and Instagram. People on average check their Facebook 15 times a day, using multiple devices, so it should not be ignored as a communication channel. Lets look at some campaign strategies you can use…

Incentivise customers from consideration to purchase

As customers move through the journey to purchase, relativity is key. If someone added something to their basket but didn’t purchase, maybe show that segment a 10% discount on their first purchase? Or give a discount to a loyal customer? You can either have the user click back to their basket or use coupon ads to sign up for a code.

Retarget visitors who are browsing your website or mobile app

If customers, or certain segments, have visited a page or product and left, or added items to a cart and not purchased, why not use carousel ads to entice them back? The dynamic product feed can pull straight from your systems to display current stock levels or price points.

Engage users/customers who don’t open your emails

If certain segments aren’t opening your emails then show them something new and visual. Choose an eye-catching image, a strong call-to-action message and give Instagram a go!

Recover lost users

Breaking up with customers doesn’t have to be permanent. If a customer seems to be slipping or hasn’t purchased with you in a while then why not target that segment with all the good benefits of your product or service? Video, as a medium on Facebook and Instagram, has proven time and time again in increase brand recall and favourability.

Find more customers like your best ones

Use a segment of your high-converting, high LTV, loyal customers to create Lookalike Audiences and let Facebook find users who are similar to them. Facebook looks at around one million characteristics to determine which users could be your next lot of best performing customers so trust in the algorithm to reach a whole new pool of people who are likely to be interested in your product/service.

Now that you have a few ideas on how to use your rich customer data on Facebook, the next step is thinking about how to best mange these segments. Timing and security are crucial here. You want to make sure that if a customer moves from one segment to another that this activity is seamlessly synced with your Facebook Custom Audiences. Equally you don’t want to be spending time, and risking PII information being exposed, by manually downloading and re-uploading CSV files every time a segment changes. That’s where Driftrock’s product ‘Flow’ comes in. Flow syncs the Custom Audience seed constantly, as often as 3 hours and thus removing the need for a physical process of updating your custom audiences. It’s also massively more secure and in turn also makes your lookalike audiences better and more robust.

So there you have it. Your CRM is a golden goose and those customers are more valuable and connected than ever before. Extend your campaigns to social channels to get them engaged and lead them down a journey to purchase through automated segments. Once they’re in your ‘best customer’ segment use Facebook lookalikes to gain more valuable customers, a beautiful and complete 360 marketing loop!

Get involved

Are you using CRM data to revolutionise your Facebook and Instagram marketing? We’d love to hear your thoughts, leave us a comment below!

If you would like to hear more about Driftrock, or just want to chat, drop us a line.